They’re doing pair-programming and test-driven development this summer, which I think is great. Sounds like they’re getting some great guidance from Pivotal Labs.

Very explicitly trying to focus on things everyone can use, rather than something for geeks.

Are trying to do micro-networks, rather than ‘everyone on the same plane’; I’m curious to see where that goes.

They’ll have single-user ‘seeds’ or multi-user ‘pods’ for servers. Push-driven, like email.

They’re doing Rails and Mongo, and even Websockets; they’re having problems between Websockets and Rails.

Planning on doing a code release by ‘flipping the github bit’ on September 15th, but will continue hacking after that, since they have a ‘low burn rate.’

Seem a bit worried about the community management problem once they go live.

Have a slide describing feature set for beta; focus on easy group management for you and close friends; private broadcasting to those friends; full data exportability.

Longer term: work with ostatus/other stuff to work closely with other distributed technologies; plugin and application infrastructure; build community and focus on design.

Anonymity is not currently a design goal, but still thinking about basic crypto and heavy focus on privacy (including privacy expectations-setting.)

In the move to california, they appear to have abandoned arepas for tacos. Bad news.

I admit I’m troubled that there is lots of talk about technology, and not much talk about UI/HCI/design, but in response to my question they say they mostly didn’t talk about it because it is still very much in flux. They’re talking with others about the problem, which is good to hear.